Part I: Louisiana techno-rave - contemporary art, Louisiana Museum, Humlebaek, Denmark - Report from Denmark

Art in America, Oct, 1996 by Richard Vine

Of all the signs confirming a new global awareness in the Danish art world, particularly during Copenhagen's tenure as "cultural capital" of the European Union for 1996, none is more striking than "NowHere"--a survey of 127 international contemporary artists recently mounted at the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, 22 miles north of the city. The exhibition's title, with its emphasis on the here and now, had some of the claim-staking defiance of the gay-rights chant "we're here, we're queer, get used to it." Yet its complementary (and often-joked-about) reading as "nowhere" also seemed at once a sardonic comment on Denmark's alleged provincialism, a parodic jibe at passe utopianism and a signal that the curatorial selections would bespeak the one-world, everywhere-and-nowhere nomadism of today's art and artists: rootless, ahistorical and increasingly cybernetic.

Such hipness was particularly significant given the show's venue. The Louisiana, Denmark's only major privately funded art museum, is a bastion of classic modernism, renowned both for its superb holdings of postwar works and for their eminently tasteful installation in galleries and gardens overlooking the sound between Denmark and Sweden. Nevertheless, with a very few exceptions, the entire collection was placed in storage for four months at the height of the tourist season (the Louisiana is Denmark's fifth most popular tourist draw, attracting over 600,000 visitors last year) in order to devote the 107,630 square feet of exhibtion space to this survey of contemporary works. The temporary usurpation could be seen, moreover, as a goodnatured Oedipal gesture by its 43-year-old organizer, Lars Nittve. Invested in 1995 as the museum's new head (ending a four-year interim directorship by Steingrim Laursen, 64, an associate director at the Louisiana for the last 25 years and now administrative deputy overseeing large exhibitions and international relations), Nittve in effect replaced the 80-year-old founding director, Knud W. Jensen, who had served since 1957.

Jensen is of the house and lineage of Alfred H. Barr. The scion of a manufacturing family, he headed the preeminent Danish publishing firm, Gyldendal, before undertaking, at age 41, to establish the Louisiana as an unprecedented public showcase for modern Danish art and design. His original museological directive, unchanged even after 1966 when the burgeoning of Documenta prompted him to expand the institution's purview to modernism tout court, was summarized in the "NowHere" catalogue by Vilhelm Wohlert. (Wohlert, with Jorgen Bo, was Jensen's architect through 37 years of expansion.) "Louisiana," they agreed, "should be like a one-family house where a rich uncle receives his guests."

In contrast, Nittve, a Swede, seems a man of the postmodern present. Formerly an art critic and, later, chief curator of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1986-90), he served until 1995 as director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art in Malmo, Sweden. In 1993, Nittve, who is well known in Scandinavia for theme shows like "Implosion" (1987) and "Trans/Mission" (1991) as well as monographic exhibitions of Picasso, Warhol, Allan McCollum, Charles Ray and others, was asked to curate a large contemporary overview for the Louisiana. Although plans did not work out at the time, the exhibition he proposed was essentially "NowHere." (It has also been reported that the concept was part of his unsuccessful bid for directorship of the upcoming Documenta.) Thus the subsequent hiring of Nittve, and his immediate decision to implement the idea that had largely won him the job, constituted a dramatic generational shift. Whereas Jensen, like Barr, treated modernism (in all its blended permutations) as the one true way for 20th-century art, Nittve pointedly debuted with a show based on the conviction, as he states in his catalogue introduction, that "we can no longer rely on the idea of dominant tendencies or 'isms,' however new and up-to-date, to help us understand what we see happening in art."

Press materials for "NowHere" describe today's cultural milieu as a terrain vague in which the forces of information, media and immigration create an "open field" for artistic efforts. The show itself is designated a "polyphonic" exhibition--i.e., one mixing many artists' voices and several curatorial points of view. Accordingly, Nittve--seeking to create a difference-rich "playground" effect--commissioned four outside curators and two Louisiana staff members, who worked as a team, to create five distinct sections, each with its own esthetic rationale.

Speculating that his maiden effort might "shake [the Louisiana] to its core," Nittve presented viewers with a dual conceptual agon. First, despite their differences of inflection, the five mini-exhibitions (most of whose curators were born about the time the Louisiana first opened) shared an adversarial stance toward high modernism. In the words of one of the guest curators, Iwona Blazwick: "The beauty of the Louisiana Museum can also seem to be a form of stasis. As a repository for a certain type and period of art object it embodies hegemony, authority and closure." Opposed to this mythic monolith were the five insurrectionist sections advocating, in various admixtures, the intensely personal, the political, the psychologically harrowing, the ecstatic and the technologically adventuresome. In other words, the displacement of modernism by postmodernism was posed as a variant of the perpetual struggle between classicism (seen in Jensen's enshrinement of the "good life" in both its economic and artistic senses) and romanticism--with all the critical approbation now going to the young Werthers.